Thursday, September 22, 2016

With humble gratitude, I
think back on the month just past, the month I shall always remember as
“exuberant August.”

Has there ever been an August
with so much precipitation spread out so evenly into so many gentle, light warm
rains?

The result in our Creek Field
was Jack-and-the-beanstalk-type growth.

The clumps of Eastern
Gamagrass were ten feet wide; the Switch Grass was ten feet tall. The Whole-leaf Rosinweeds and Sawtooth
Sunflowers were even taller. Their
bright yellow flowers said good-bye to earth and reached for the sky.

The plants had so much energy it spilled over to me. Every time I was near them I felt exhilarated!

Exuberance--it was an emotion inextricable from either the plants or me. We shared it!

But plants don’t have a
nervous system. Surely they didn’t really share an emotion with me?

Let me go into some background information and then return to that question.

Since 2013, we have been
working to restore a native plant community to our Creek Field, 30 acres of bottomground along McDowell Creek.

Cup Plant (Silphium perfoliatum)
volunteered near the creek.

Some bottomland prairie
species, such as Bee Balm and Spiderwort, also grow in the uplands. But others absolutely require a low, moist
site. These are the ones made scarce in
the Flint Hills by the almost universal plowing of bottomground once the
settlers arrived in the 19th century. Several
of those species bloomed in our Creek Field this August. One of them—the hauntingly beautiful Blue
Vervain—had been in our seed mix.
Another was a volunteer--Cup Plant--so named for the vessel formed where
its leaves merge at the stem. This
August, all of its “cups” held water!

Moisture-loving plants such
as American Germander doubled and tripled the size of their patches, while
early blooming species, like Canada Milkvetch and Echinacea, set seed in July
but bloomed again in August.

This profusion of plant life
spilled over into an abundance of animals.

The Creek Field filled up
with hummingbirds, quail, goldfinches, Indigo Buntings, and Dickcissels. At dusk, hummingbirds were replaced by
hummingbird moths, while overhead, dragonflies, barn swallows, and nighthawks
filled the air.

Euphoria sepulcralis, Dark Flower Scarab
on a Tall Thistle
in the Creek Field. August 2016.

Some of the insects I found on August flowers were
old friends, such as the drunken Euphoria Beetle, always at his pollen-bottle,
deep in a thistle-flower; or the just-emerged Monarch butterflies, not a tatter
in their wings, drinking deeply of August nectar.

Others were new to me, such as the gorgeous
moths I slowly came to know only through the help of cameras, computers,
generous entomologists, and bugguide.net.

Bush Cicada (Tibicen dorsata)Creek Field, August 2016

As night fell, coyotes and Barred Owls would
begin to call but could scarcely be heard through the almost impenetrable wall
of sound put up by katydids’ trills and cicadas’ screams. Raucous August!

All of this made me feel
exhilarated--but not as if the feeling came from within. It felt as if the emotion were already in
the field, and I simply went into it. As
I walked into the field, I walked into the feeling.

I know that sounds New
Agey. How can the human emotion of
exuberance arise from a non-human assemblage of life?

But I don’t want to deny the
experience just because it sounds wifty, or raises a question for which I have
no lock-down, end-of-discussion answer.

What happens if we frame the question
within a context of existing knowledge?

Let’s take it step by
step: An exuberant person is a
high-spirited person. But the root of
the word has to do with external reality, not with internal feelings. The Latin root “uber” means fertility,
abundance, growth. Add the prefix “ex,”
and it means lavish fertility, super-abundance, phenomenal growth—like our
Creek Field this past August.

It makes sense that the ancient meaning eventually
gave birth to the modern: Lavish
fertility of the land meant humans would survive and thrive—a spirit-lifter, if
ever there was one. Exuberant land
meant exuberant people.

So the Creek Field imparted
its exuberance to me through ancient associations that became hard-wired in the
human brain?

Perhaps. But could there be additional explanations?

Plants communicate with their
environment through the production and release of chemicals. As
Michael Pollan writes, “Plants speak in a chemical vocabulary.” Wildflowers swaying in the wind are not just
a lovely spectacle; they are also emitters of what Pollan calls “chemical chatter.”

We don’t have ears to hear
this chatter.

But maybe we aren’t as deaf
as all that.

Among the chemicals plants
produce are two that function in mammals as neurotransmitters and
mood-regulators—serotonin and dopamine.

Could we be more attuned to plants’
messenger molecules than we realize? Do
we have capacities we have yet to develop?

Botantist Robin Wall Kimmerer
thinks so. “Listening in wild places,
we are audience to a conversation in a language not out own,” she writes. She believes we humans were once fluent in
that language and that we can become fluent once again.

In her book Braiding
Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of
Plants, Kimmerer explores human-plant relationships by comparing the
experimental method of Western science with the nature-learning of her
Potawatomi culture. In addition to
mutual confirmations, the comparison reveals differences. Western science asks about a plant, “What are its
parts? How does it work?” Indigenous wisdom, based in a tradition of
sacred reciprocity, converses with a plant, asking, “What can you teach us?”

When Kimmerer started
college, she found that the science curriculum would never address her most
basic question, the one that led her to biology in the first place: “I wanted to know why we love the world, why
the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.”

That’s not too different from
my question: What is this exuberance
that is both out there in the Creek
Field and in here, in my head and heart?

Scientists, some of whom are
at this moment setting up experiments to test entomologist E. O. Wilson’s “biophilia
hypothesis” (which posits humans’ innate affinity for non-human life), will
certainly help with the answer.

But all of us can help: When among plants, we can ask freely and
listen deeply.

We can pay attention, with
open hearts.

A modified version of this essay was published in the Junction City Daily Union on September 16, 2016. The short video below shows the Creek Field in August 2016. The sunflowers sport not only blossoms but Dickcissel families and a juvenile Indigo Bunting. And you can see (and hear) that Deci shares in the exuberance!